Our story

Hello! We're James and Kristie Dahlia Home. In 2017, we quit our jobs, sold our house in San Francisco, moved aboard our 40 foot sloop Rejoice, and prepared to sail south with no set destination or schedule. Getting Free is the story of how we let go of our comfortable life in a city we loved for the wild uncertainty of the sea.

We each came to San Francisco and our work there in pursuit of freedom, for ourselves and for others. Kristie studied with poets, monks, and mages and offered this back to the world with her hands and her voice, becoming a healer, teacher, and minister-of-sorts. James helped give birth to the web, which held the promise of providing new ways for us to come to a better understanding of ourselves, one another, and the world. We found each other in the Black Rock Desert in 1997. We found amazing co-conspirators, worked hard, partied harder, and loved hardest.

Then we spent too much time in office buildings and hospitals, on crowded highways and busses. Beloved friends and lovers died. Many of the things we had once found freedom in now seemed to bind us. The modern devotion to convenience-above-all started to look like an existential abdication to us.

One day in 2010, we got on a sailboat.

In sailing, we found a forcing function for becoming the kinds of people we want to be. It demands simplicity, preparation, kindness, and awareness. It requires a deep commitment to both self-sufficiency and the world community of seafolk. It turns our attention to the sky and the sea and our boat and one another, and most of all to the world around us. This world is full of places where science and spirit intersect on the water, and we're going to go explore them. We hope you'll come along!